UK charities: make IWF Web blacklist 100% compulsory for ISPs

A group of UK children's charities say it's a travesty that only 95 percent of …

Most ISPs in the UK currently (and voluntarily) subscribe to the Internet Watch Foundation's child sex abuse blacklist. But five percent of home broadband connections aren't covered by the IWF blacklist, and a group of children's charities is calling for government action to make the list compulsory.

The Children’s Charities Coalition on Internet Safety issued a statement yesterday demanding that the government mandate Internet censorship—a touchy area in which the government has been treading cautiously. Despite the (near) universal condemnation of child sex pictures and movies (IWF refuses to call them "pornography"), the government has hesitated to make the IWF blacklist a requirement for ISPs, opting to leave the door open to self-regulation. 95 percent of ISPs have voluntarily agreed to use the list, but the Children's Charities Coalition says there's no reason for anyone to have the option of accessing the blocked sites.

"Over 700,000 households in the UK can still get uninterrupted and easy access to illegal child abuse image sites," said advisor Zoe Hilton in a statement yesterday. "Allowing this loophole helps to feed the appalling trade in images which feature real children being seriously sexually assaulted. We now need decisive action from the government to ensure the Internet Service Providers that are still refusing to block this foul material are forced to fall into line. Self-regulation on this issue is obviously failing—and in a seriously damaging way for children."

In early February, the UK government indicated its support for doing something to increase these numbers, though it did not commit to immediate legislation. Alan Campbell, Home Office Minister, told the charities in a letter that "the Government are currently looking at ways to progress the final five percent."

The IWF is a nongovernmental group that receives EU funding and is backed by most of the large ISPs in the UK. Its blacklist came under fire several months ago after the IWF decided that an old Scorpions album cover of a young girl was obscene and attempted to block access to the picture on Wikipedia. It rescinded the decision after an Internet outcry.

Though perhaps best known in the US for the Wikipedia controversy, IWF has existed since 1996 and has operated with little drama. The critiques aimed at its blacklist service don't generally concern improper classification of websites but rather claims that the IWF system is ineffective.

Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC blogged about this very issue Tuesday, talking with Cambridge computer scientist Richard Clayton about the good that an IWF-style blacklist can do. Clayton noted that the system doesn't stop the casual or inadvertent browsing of child abuse images because such browsing doesn't actually happen; the people who see this material seek it out, generally at hidden or for-pay sites. And simple URL blacklists are unlikely to stop such people from accessing the images.

"This material tends to be held on paid-for sites or is held by people who don't publish it to the world because they don't want to get arrested," he said. "Everybody thinks they've done something by blocking this stuff but in practice it makes very little difference to who sees it and it's quite expensive."